Airlines have explored the potential for aircraft and flight crews exchanging data in real time with ground base staff and systems to enhance operational efficiency and safety of flight. In order to provide for updates on the meteorological conditions over the flight route, the varying performance of aircraft systems, changing air traffic control restrictions and/or opportunities, some form of communication between the aircraft and ground has to be implemented.
Communication between an aircraft and communication transceivers external to the aircraft, such as satellites, ground stations or towers, is facilitated by means of wireless communication terminals having an antenna and a transceiving modulator/demodulator on-board of the aircraft. With the aircraft in flight, a complex network infrastructure of spatially spread ground stations and/or satellites is a pre-requisite for obtaining good communication coverage. The higher the desired coverage of possible aircraft flight paths is, the more network infrastructure needs to be provided.
A possible approach for facilitation inter-aircraft (A2A) and ground-to-aircraft (G2A) communication is the use of aircraft ad-hoc networks: Self-organizing networks where aircraft work as mobile nodes of the network. Ad-hoc networks are dynamic networks that may be created anywhere with just two nodes capable of ad-hoc networking that do not necessarily require a centralized infrastructure. Such ad-hoc networks for aircraft are for example described in Vivek, K.; Rana, A.; Kumar, S.: “Aircraft Ad-hoc Network (AANET)”, International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering, vol. 3(5), p. 6679-6684, May 2014, or U.S. Pat. No. 7,085,562 B1 which discloses an airborne telecommunications network that uses airborne aircraft to route message traffic between a source and destination.
However, there is a need for wireless aircraft networks which are able to operate more reliably and efficiently.